Even more odd discoveries in RodeoHouston’s lost and found

A lot has happened to RodeoHouston’s lost and found office since the last time we visited, during the first week of the event. The committee members who run the office are now awash in coats, cowboy hats, children’s shoes without mates, and a lot of your lost cellphones.

Robert “Bubba” Lange is our guide today, opening up the shelves to our prying eyes. He loves opening the plastic tubs and opining about how each item could have gotten lost or left behind.

According to figures supplied by rodeo staff, as of Tuesday morning, March 18, they have processed over 1,000 items, including 262 IDs and credit cards, 170 cellphones and other electronics, and 226 pieces of jewelry.

Listed separately are the 201 lost children who have appeared in the lost and found’s makeshift child-care wing. Thirty-seven children showed up in the lost and found on March 12, during the height of spring break. Country heartthrob Jake Owen played that night, and 18 kids showed up in their office during the second shift.

The last time we were here, there was a diamond ring in an envelope. Lange said those are best retrieved with the help of a jeweler’s receipt and insurance paperwork. That ring has been joined by three other rings now, which sit in their own envelopes. There are a handful of passports in a plastic tub, too, which could mean someone is having a heck of a time leaving town.

Everything not taken up a couple days after RodeoHouston will be donated to charity, Lange said. The hats, the jackets, the shoes, and the strollers will all find a charitable home. The cellphones could go to a program for battered women. Everything will get a second life beyond the rodeo, Lange said.

“The rodeo is pretty good about everything winding up with charity so that nothing gets trashed,” he said.

I hope that goes for the giant stuffed Finding Nemo toy, too.

One committee member came up to show me their new “confetti,” which is really just a plastic bag of shredded credit cards, destroyed per credit card company request. There’s a reporter’s notebook, not unlike my own, sitting on a shelf, and features the phone numbers and names of eyewitnesses and interview subjects. The committee members think it might be from a local TV newsman.

The office is excited to meet the woman who is supposed to finally come and get her single, lost, scuffed pink high heel, left behind during cookoff weekend, weeks back.

“She called last week and has yet to come and pick it up,” said one committee member. Jokes about a rodeo Cinderella spread throughout the lost and found office.

Lange said that a few years back on his watch, there was a medical practitioner on site hosting seminars on self breast examinations.

“He lost his suitcase that had a rubber model of a woman’s breast thing. He came by pretty quick, about 20 minutes later, to pick that up,” Lange laughs. Think a Resusci Anne but with just a torso.

Unlike Debbie Kasper, who guided us last week through the lost items, Lange can say that he’s had an artificial leg come through the office, at least once. No one came to claim the below-the-knee prosthetic. Maybe the owner was angling for a new one anyway and needed to “lose” it, someone suggested.

“Maybe that thing was hurting and they just left it behind,” smirked one committee member. Lange has another idea, aside from one that involves alcohol.